* It is important how Philadelphia born Bail came to be an analyst. Oneof six U.S. WW II Bomber** navigators trained in the then new-fangledradar, Dr. Bail's B-24s kept getting shot up, the pilots near mortallywounded, and Dr. Bail, a man of modest stature, amusingly kept guidingthe wrecks to assafe a survival landing as was possible. For these featshe has been amply decorated. Finally shot down in enemy territory, hesurvived the six weeks prior to liberation in a German hospital undercircumstances that resemble the more sentimental but life-changingaspects of _A Farewell to Arms_: being loved and nursed, and as a Jew,by the enemy. Anyhow, a sufficiently transformative experience, if weare to believe his account in _Irmgard_, for an interest in Frenchhistory, to become medicinal, leading to a training at the SouthernCalifornia in the then traditional manner. Bail, now an analyst flier,was the one who brought Alfred Bion to the United States; when theKleinians, in whose work Dr. Bail became greatly interested [who hadpromised Bion a full complement of patients], copped out, Dr. Bailbecame his first and only patient for some time. Bail stayed with Bionfor his ten year duration in SoCal yet did not end up a Bionist himself;[and I must not be the only person who wishesfor his account of thatexperience]. A combination of conscientiousnessand requisite vanity drove him to take a direction of his own. Apractice with a concentration on dreams as evidence, with somediscounting of wish fulfillment - where it needs to be kept in mind evenwith the plentitude that dreams afford - in the poetic words of our nowex-DefSec, "we don't know what we don't know," we cannot know what isnot manifested in dreams, nor at what realms of the unconsciousmechanism that we know to operate at others, continue their blinding.Dreams are Bails chief baseline and the various beautiful, simple casestudies collected in _The Mother's Signature_ provide evidence of Bail'slegerdemain.From this work derives Dr. Bail's idea of "the mother's signature,"which has much to recommend it even if you don't buy into Dr. Bail'semphasis that such imprinting, as he calls it, may be, invariably, themost determining for spiritual flourishing, or so frequently itsthwarting: Dr. Bail's findings - under aegis of what a skeptic might sayis something of a fetishization of science [where an entirely differentand non-jumbo-mumbo science cries to be developed]- are finding muchsupportin evolutionary biological and fetal development studies that show theexertion of maternal pressures even on the genetic and on DNA,intra-uterine! Whether untoward changes in development - howeverformulated within the specific family and larger culture - are amenableto analytic exploration can only be assessed under the wishfulproposition that as of a certain age of experience as large a percentageof the population as possible not so much shed as pass the immediatedeterminants of their upbringing, including the limitations imposedintra-uterine, through the analytic process. Come the day.More immediately, parallel studies of twins, but not brought up by the samemother, might confirm or alter Dr. Bail's findings. I have asked Dr.Bail, also the first analyst to accompany patients on the trip acrossthe river Lethe, whether he had patients who were with child whilein analysis, but have not heard back. There is no such case among thosepresented here, or where he had both mother and a child in analysis. Theidea of a mother's disposition during pregnancy exerting itselflife-long on a fetus is scarcely unfamiliar, I know of scores of hideousand wonderful examples where, however, the passage from intra- toextra-uterine - where the untoward influences of course persist - posesthe question of the duration and inception of lifelong traumatization,whose vestiges exert their latent power at critical moments. Anyhow:etiology in the here and now. Dr. Bail's notion of a mother'sunconscious negative influence then splitting the developing psychestrikes me very much within the tradition of the Kleinians and Kohut,though splitting I suspect is far too mechanistic a concept to explainthe mental realms that fail to communicate with each other. To take thisbriefly out of the theoretical into the here and now of the comically,abeit gallows humor, historical: what might the influence of beingintra-uterine "Battelship Barbara" be, as compared to the oedipalrelations with George Herbert, and growing up in an environment wherestates can be overthrown at a moments notice, on our president; or maybewe ought to seek the whale in Ma Cheney's womb. But that is PeterLowenberg's unenviable field.No matter the import of the ultimate scientific verifiability of Dr.Bail's ideas, he comes across as an enviably conscientious andcourageous and loving analyst who keeps stubbornly guiding his woundedB-24s to as safe a landing as is feasible.*